Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li, 2023
The magic trick:
A story about a woman’s thoughts, as she works to make sense of her life
I don’t know much about Yiyun Li’s biography, but I know enough that this story of a mother processing her daughter’s suicide is almost so real it’s too much for the reader to bear.
That said, an amazing story.
Its narrative propulsion is mysterious. It moves very slowly, spending so much time jumping from its present tense back into the past as our protagonist goes back over different memories of her daughter. But there are many other tangents into her mind too – memories of her own mother, lots of talk about novels and the nature of writing.
But what is driving our interest? It’s really just a woman on a train thinking about lots of things. Why was it so riveting as a reading experience?
I think it’s that we become engaged in this “figuring out” process the same as the protagonist. We want to see how she assembles all these thoughts and feelings; all this pain. We want to see what she comes up with, so that perhaps we’ll be able to take notes for our own lives.
And that’s quite a trick on Li’s part.
The selection:
There are two types of mothers: those who have not taught their children to be kind to themselves, and those who have not learned to be kind to their children.
Really? Rosalie thought. Are you sure there are only those two types? Surely some mothers, having done a better job, fall into neither category? Rosalie did not remember writing those lines in her notebook, but they were on the same page as a couple of other notes that she had a vague memory of having written. One of them read, You can’t declutter an untimely death away; the other consisted of two lines from a nursery rhyme: Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go. She must have written those lines on a Wednesday. Marcie had been born on a Wednesday, and had died on a Thursday, fifteen years and eleven months later. For a while after her death, every Thursday had felt like a milestone, and every Thursday Rosalie and Dan had left flowers at the mouth of the railway tunnel where Marcie had laid herself down to die. One week gone, two weeks gone, then three, four, five. It occurred to Rosalie that the only other time when parents count the days and weeks is when a child is newborn.
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